As greater numbers of people use the World Wide Web for communication, commerce, and other daily activities, they generate larger and larger volumes of traffic over the Internet. Because the benefits of commercializing the Internet can be tremendous, businesses increasingly take advantage of this traffic by advertising their products or services online. These advertisements may appear in the form of leased advertising space (e.g., “banners”) on content websites, which are operated by “publishers” who control the website content and the availability and cost of the advertising space or “ad inventory.”
Advertisers of various products or services may create online advertising campaigns that include advertisements designed to be placed on content websites during a specified period of time. For example, an automobile company may design several advertisements for a new model and may wish to have the advertisements placed online during a period surrounding the launch of the new model. Each time one of the advertisements is shown to a viewer of the website is known as an “impression.” When shown the advertisement, the user may select, or “click,” on the advertisement or may take another “action” such as completing an online form to request more information. If the user later purchases the new model of automobile, the purchase is referred to as a “conversion” of the impression. Advertisers may pay owners of content Web sites (i.e., the publishers) based on, for example, the number of impressions, clicks, or conversions over the course of an advertising campaign.
In some cases, an advertiser may have a marketing plan that identifies certain types of people as being target audience members for a given product or service. For example, the advertiser may wish to spend money only on users having certain demographics or personal interests. Alternatively, advertisers may be unsure of which people are most likely to respond to a given product, service, or advertisement. Therefore, advertisers may wish to obtain very specific information about the types of consumers viewing various types of web sites and responding to their advertisements. In some cases, advertisers may be willing to spend more money per impression, click, or conversion based on known information about those users interacting with the advertisements. As a result, publishers of content websites and/or facilitators of third party advertising networks may wish to obtain as much information as possible about consumers and other users traveling between web pages associated with an advertising network.
The present disclosure is directed to achieving one or more of the above-referenced goals by performing online user profiling and segmentation.